Matrilineal Line
How stories would sew us one to the other—
the shape of my body against time,
the shadow of yours, and yet we speaking
across generations, having genetic conversations—
how a cell comes to know when to divide,
or a chromosome how to color the eyes, or curl the hair.
How it is to see your own face reappear in another,
nested there like history’s strange bird.
I would not know your hospital room,
or the twin engines of your beauty and disease,
but something in the breast recognizes, something calls
names across the lines of the living and dead. You
are the womb of the womb that carried my own,
and already, when my daughter was born, she carried
the eggs of my grandchildren. As if that is all that we are,
mere vessels—but no—something more, bodies
that unfold history, our blood on every doorstep.
The way you birthed my mother while sleeping, body sipping
on the heavy drip of anaesthesia. The rough tongue
of the world licking you back, pushing your baby
into your arms, saying she is yours, and you saying,
This? Me? And I, who twisted and turned like a blind mole,
cord around the neck three times, the noose of my life—
the forceps tugging my tiny blue body out. Then I passed into
the birthing fire with my own, wide-awake—bald with pain,
the head breaking through the way the bulb pushes up soil,
that crushing before opening out into air. How tangled
these births, these rivers that run through the body over
and over until furrows form, inherited, tendencies appearing
over time like bright, errant threads. These are our stories,
clutched in the hand like wildflowers. Pick one—find
the longest stem, the deepest throat—the very ovary housing
the queen bee who will sting you again and again, her venom
paining you so deeply that it saves your life.
-First appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fall, 2006
